Reflecting on the week in KB

I have been a bit of an inconsistent blogger. We have been doing so much great stuff in Kindergarten and the kids are a dream! (well most of the time lol) It is one of those groups of kids that for the rest of their school career people will just say WOW (you know, like the 100 year flood, once in a lifetime and you'll never forget it) Anyway....here is a look at some of the things we have been up to in the last couple of weeks.

Every week we look at a letter in focus and end the week with Friday Funday (also known as double bee Friday, where kids get double the reward - bees on their chart). Every Friday morning, we do craft to compliment the focus letter and 2 Fridays ago we made these fun igloos. We try to incorporate many different art/craft techniques to get students feeling confident in all aspects of art and craft. For this one, we used sponges to do the background with paint, then crayon to colour the small elements on the eskimo and penguins and finally the cutting and gluing onto the painted background. I evn made my kids mount their own artworks, as it gave me a little look at their spacial awareness (could they place it in the middle of the backing page). Then for some fun, I sprayed them all with glitter hairspray (which got me in a tonne of trouble from the cleaner!)

For maths this week, it more dice pattern and numeral ID stuff. The kids got really great at it and by the end of the week ( as we played this game 4 days in a row) I only had 3 kids out of 22 who subitizing was not automatic. And of those 3, 2 of them were only struggling with the number 4 for some reason. You can grab these freebie game mats in my post HERE.

I shared this one on Instagram and FB - we have a new reading corner! I had the shelving, benches and mat, but last weekend my boss bought me this tent at IKEA. All it took was a little rearranging of furniture and ta-da. The kids beg to be able to go and read when they are finished so it is definitely working. Do you have a fun reading corner?

Ahhhhhhh book club! It is one of the best presents! Eve if you have to give it to yourself. With both of my own children at school (in K and Yr1) books are definitely devoured in my house. The top spread is all the ones I bought for home while the bottom row is more to add to the classroom library. And for the second month in a row, my book club bill has been over $100....dont tell the husband please lol.

Thursday we celebrated the 40th anniversary of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We read the story in class and I was surprised to see how many students were not familiar with the story. Then we made these cute headbands to make us look like caterpillars from the story - the kids and the parents loved them! 

We dont just craft in Kinder, but these are the only other pics I took last week. We had a focus on R and made this gorgeous rainbow. The techiniques we use were chipping and gluing and it incorporated a lot of talking about colours as well as the size of the segments of the rainbow. The finished product, with cotton wool cloud, looks so fabulous hung in my room :)

Wow, what a week (and a bit). I will try hard to take photos of some other learning that is going on. AND I am almost ready for a classroom tour now my room is looking so colourful and inviting.

Classroom Photos!

Well I know it has been a term already...and a long term at that....and I have finally gotten around to taking some pics of a semi-clean classroom to share with you :)

 Weclome to KB!!! This is a shot from the entry to class. You can see that I have 4 table groups and still have a big floor area for group gathering, small groups and IWB stuff. How cute is the craft looking?

 This is the view looking from the front of the room back. Besides my computer to run the IWB, I have one more desktop in my room. This will be used more next term for small group activities or fast finishers. you can also see into the room next door - we have big heavy sliding doors which sadly we have been keeping closed a lot because out classes seem to settle better in their own space.

 This is from the other front corner looking back. I have a cupboard near my door which holds my maths groups boxes and reading group boxes. It is also where the kids put their home reader every day and has other stuff we use pretty frequently like crayons, magnetic letters etc.

 The front, next to my IWB. The extra whiteboard is handy as I can jot things down. But at the moment, it is more of a storage space for papers. You can see the purple cards - these are our Bee Cards (behaviour management cards). When the kids are doing something great, trying hard etc, they are told to get a bee. 10 bees = lucky dip prize. They also get to tell the class they have 10 bees and then the class chants "10 bees, 10 bees, 10 bees". Its pretty cute! Under the board is the rules - Be Kind BE Safe Be Fair (goes with the bees see?) and up the top is the birthday charts (get them from Mel @ From the Pond)

 This is definitely the cutest place in the room - I'll call it the IKEA corner.The green tubs hold books, math manipulatives, playdoh.....I really do need to make some labels though! The little table has been so handy as it is a great spot for group work. The kids love coming to sit here.

 One of the reading spots featuring my crafty recovered chair (and matching IKEA pillow). My books need to be organised better though. The little yellow tub up the top is full of non-fiction sight word readers I got from book club that are definitely a hit with the kiddies. The rainbow chair is highly sought after at free reading time.

A view of the front, featuring my helper Miss M. The rainbow bench is where I sit and the IWB is the star of the show. Someone built these nifty stages and steps for our K and 1 classes as it was hard for them to reach a lot of stuff. On the left is my other small whiteboard which becomes our word wall for our sound of the week and behind that is numbers to 30, ten frames to 10, days, months and calendar.

Hope you have enjoyed a glimpse into my classroom :)